I was listening to a podcast featuring Professor Jiang, George Friedman, and Robert Pape. This podcast was just raw geo-politics being argued from three different perspectives. George Friedman is like the anti-catastrophists from the 1890s who took over the geological field. Jiang is the new modern voice with outside perspectives and no real insider knowledge, and Pape is an advisor to the government and researcher from the Chicago school. Between them, there is more than 100 years of experience, sitting around a wooden table, speaking to the world.

When Trump’s time on earth is done, this period will be named for him, as Napoleon’s was.

The conversation kept breaking down to Friedman arguing that this period is not abnormal in American history, while Pape promoted his book written on modern political violence, and Jiang speaking about Israel and its influence.

At one point, Friedman said something that raised my eyebrow. “We are an invented nation with no history or cultural reference.”

I 100% agree. You all know this, and some of you hate me for it. Is what it is, but I can make an argument that all of what you all call culture was the remnants of the places we all left to come here and has been systematically bred out of us over the years by mass public education and capitalism commodifying every aspect of our lives and demanding the friction of culture be rubbed off.

Now, if this is his understanding, I cannot understand how he could hold the opinion that the modern era of massive cultural and demographic upheavals is normal. He brought up the Civil War being an aberration among nations. Like how we came back together afterward. From my studies of history, there was an occupation and reorganization of the South during Reconstruction. This means there were military and police forces standing guard. Add to this the Industrial Revolution and the boom afterward. The South didn’t participate as much, but there was most definitely participation.

He also brought up how the Scotch-Irish, regular Irish, and Italians were hated and then became integrated into the matrix we call the United States. This, of course, was while the country was building its cities and mass infrastructure, such as electrification, rail, steelwork, roads, dams, and other projects that marked the early part of the 20th century. Oh, and let’s not forget that after WW1 and WW2, the United States accounted for 50% of global manufacturing output. Even then, there were union strikes and inequality and poverty in rural and urban environments, enough to prompt the 1960s Great Society acts. During the Civil War and after, there wasn’t a gerontocracy, and there were state- and federal-funded pensions for all Civil War soldiers. Add to this the fact that the map of the United States during the period following the Civil War was largely blank, and many people just headed west, staked a claim, and built new lives. Where is anyone gonna go today to start a new life and find free land without a government telling them how to build their home and enforcing massive amounts of codes that drive up the cost and skill level? I am not arguing against codes; I’m just saying that in the 1870s you could go build a sod house and plow a field after staking a claim and, through hard work and determination, squeak out a living. I can understand if you are anywhere and can go to Thailand to purchase a ladyboy to feed you grapes; there are options, but for those of us with skills, careers, and families, there is no escaping this place.

There is a thought in geopolitics about why Mexico and other Latin American countries never get any better. It is thought that the United States’ southern border being as porous as the Chinese submarine fleet allows people who are unhappy with their economic or political situation to just leave and slip across the border, thereby reducing the need for governments to ever have true revolutions or fixes for problems. Hence why it is actually better for us to put up walls guarded by machine gun nests and dogs with laser beams on their heads than to continue to have an open southern border. Regardless of how good it is for the baby boomers’ stock options and the urbanites’ DoorDash addictions. If people cannot just up and leave, revolutions happen, and millions of people’s lives get better rather than the ones who stayed at home to care for Grampa and Grampa to keep being preyed upon by the local cartel thug.

Which brings us to the Gerontocracy. After the civil war, the life expectancy of a person who survived childhood was 55. The demographic pyramid from that period wasn’t the stovepipe we have in 2026; it looked much more like that of a central African country today.

Jiang addressed this briefly, but the subject quickly switched. This is where George Friedman’s analysis fails him somewhat because if you look at the problems with the demographics of mass immigration, with the country going from a majority-white to a minority white population, and then add in the boomers hoarding all the housing and wealth and political power, this becomes a powder keg with no release valve. We can argue that boomers will die and pass down their wealth, but the truth is the average boomer is spending all their wealth in an economy where wages have been stagnant for 40 years. The demographic issue is the social cohesion issue where the civilizational capital on a local level is completely broken down due to the mass influx of foreign groups into small communities, where the boomers whose parents cut the grass for free at baseball fields and served on fire brigades or local volunteer operations stopped happening because their kids aren’t inheriting it. They sent their children to college to become good corporate managers, and they ended up becoming bugmen and never came home. They fly trans flags blm stickers, drive Subarus, and order DoorDash while supporting me too. Or they end up with Asian wives living in the suburbs, jerking off to tranny porn while memeing on Twitter about how Hitler did nothing wrong. They both support an idea of whiteness that divorces them from any local or regional culture due to the economic destruction of all the local economies during the neo liberal period and financialization of the American continent.

Pape points out how both sides have become comfortable with political violence to achieve their means. This is, of course, the same Latin American issue without the release valve of the American border, which would allow some of them to flee and reduce the pressure.

Friedman’s point that we have solved these problems before is moot, given that the circumstances are completely different. Even in the 1970s or late 60s, when there was a draft during an unpopular war, people could still get jobs that supported their families or buy a home that didn’t cost 10 times the median annual salary. The cost of an apartment wasn’t the entire earnings of a lower-middle-income worker, and the cost of college to climb the ladder wasn’t 3 times a worker’s annual salary, and it actually paid off. Add to this that the number of immigrants as a part of the employed population wasn’t 38%; it was 5%. This competition for basic necessities creates explosive situations. We discussed in the last article that war is a continuation of politics by other means, and that politics is a continuation of economics by other means. Politics is the pursuit of power and the exception in society. If you create a minority of natives born humans, they are not weaker; they are more concentrated. Once you create a situation where they are desperate, a concentrated, desperate minority becomes a permanent resistance that will eventually figure out that violence is the answer. This usually results in breakaway civilizations that create their own militaries and hierarchies. Bitcoin is a response to the modern markets locking out normal people. The entire tech structure is full of small communities who are locked out of modern society and have become a massive problem for larger structures that cannot pivot as quickly as the internet can.

There is also the echo chamber issue, which I spoke about after the Christ Church shooting, where I said: “If you push people to the fringes, they do not become deradicalized; they become more radicalized.” This is what happens in schools and prisons where you send the worst offenders. Instead of rehabilitating criminals, you create worse ones who are trauma-bonded to the other criminals. This is what our society has done to the native population of white and black men in our society. The structure tried folding in the blacks and threw all the white males out onto the street, where they just met in the street and began figuring out how to break the system. It is getting worse as more and more of our society is being pushed to the fringes. Since we all biologically love grandma and grandpa, we can’t expect anyone to actually commit the day of the pillow. (By the way, they are on sale on my TeePublic if you want your own Day of the Pillow pillow. Also more designs and memes.) https://www.teepublic.com/throw-pillow/74373233-day-of-the-pillow?store_id=191889

So we will turn on each other long before we turn on the boomers or our government. The government will turn on us before we turn on it. The structure of how our invented nation works is that it promotes a structure that allows for the financialization of our land and people, or commodification, to allow for invention and innovation to keep itself having access to the latest tech so it can remain at the head of the pack of other nations internationally. It is like a guy who uses cattle prods to keep their horses moving as fast as possible while feeding them as little as possible to maximize returns. The horses in the stable at night will bite and kick each other and the hands who clean their stables because they are completely stressed out and the owner is out of reach.

Does this mean I am predicting or advocating for political violence? No of course not I have kids and would prefer peace. But the problem is that there are not a lot of ways of escaping slavery without going through the overseers. It is what it is. There is a reason the government is installing Flock cameras. It is because they need to keep an eye on these 30 million asylum seekers. 50 million? 70 million? I nor anyone else has any idea how many undocumented asylum seekers they have brought in without the cultural training of the public school system they used to brainwash the rest of us into accepting this system.

Zeihan once said humans tend to go to war over economic ideas. And while we don’t have barbarians at the gates nor a major security issue. If we look at the liberal system of economics, we can see it is completely broken and needs to be thrown out and rethought. Maybe we should do this before the Okalala Aqueduct is completely dried up, before the last of the fish disappear from the oceans, or before Florida is completely underwater. Or maybe before the last of us who remember a world without the internet goes the way of the dinosaur.

Anyway, I am the Appalachian Gorilla. I hope you enjoyed. Drop a sub or become a paid subscriber; every little bit helps. I am out.